山路落花Mountain Path, Fallen Blossoms
ちりそむる First snowfall
春の初雪 of cherry petals
ふりぬれば starting to scatter―
ふみ分けまうき how hateful, tramping through it
滋賀の山越 over the pass from Shiga!

[English translation by Burton Watson]

Gaining access to an intuitive expression that might be shared between our two thought processes was explored associatively. Pictorially an image of “composed” dried flowers was sent from one composer to the other, who responded with carefully selected poems about “falling flowers”, expressing a synergy between the desires of the composers for a communication which worked with onomatopoeic gestural components, both linguistically and expressively. The tradition of rich visual imagery within Japanese poetry was the background to the access behind these intuitive thoughts, where both composers sought through natural phenomena, the materiality of expression: Mountain Path, Fallen Blossoms from “Sankashuu” became a starting point to access their respective musical languages.

21. May 2014 8pm | Meyerhold Centre, Moscow | There was never any war up here – “Erwartung” Festival for 1st World War Centenary | Studio for New Music Moscow, Nathalie Latham & Euvegenia Chtchelkova [dance]

There was never any war up here.
Hier oben war niemals Krieg.
Здесь никогда небыло войны.

Austrian-Russian project “Erwartung/Anticipation” – Vladimir Tarnopolski with Vera Serebriakova for Year of the Austrian culture in Russia
Studio for New Music Moscow, ensemble-in-residence at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory

Lay down your arms. (1889)
English title of the 1889 novel “Die Waffen Nieder!” by the Austrian pacifist activist Bertha von Suttner, who received the first 1905 Nobel Peace Prize.

my breath
now,
is the
breath of
my
ancestors,
struggling
in the
light
of the
moon,
to finally
be given
back to
the
earth.

war? why a war? why? is a bullet driven through the brains of another’s thoughts ever going to solve anything? did we come so far, only to return to madness,
deafening,
realism. sucking its freedom as a hideous piece of covering,
underneath our sleep.
blankets cold.
food.
Gone.

We have come to appreciate that unconscious psychic processes are in themselves ‘timeless’. This primarily means that they are not temporally ordered; that time does not alter them in any way; and that the notion of time cannot be applied to them. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (2003: 67)

Freud has taught us that retrieving memory actively is sometimes the only way to try to relinquish old patterns of behaviour, set by circumstances outside of our control which may have happened in the deep past. Repeating and working through these memories, with our feelings open and welcoming, allows us to find new insights and perspectives in life. I’m exploring in this performance, an album of retrieved memory, where I draw from various musical forms of repetition, allowing multiple ways to diffuse and subject these memories to new fields of emotional distortion and new inner balance.

A construction site of the short opera Wärme, Libretto & Composition by Tamara Friebel, video by Nathalie Latham; produced at Rondo Atelier no. 6 for WIEN MODERN/Progetto Semiserio/mediaOpera/Palais Kabelwerk/IGNM November 14-17 2013.

Sound can be heard and also viewed as a wavelength, a perfect symmetrical waveform. I am interested in the silence of this lake, but I see the contradictory forces, where the visual wavelength represents to me a drowning white noise, sometimes an image of clarity and focus, and without me being able to pinpoint it, I am suddenly drawn into its polarity of unfocussed ignore and neglect. The zero-crossing, like a zero-crossing of a sine wave, at the apex crossing of this symmetry, is where the silence is held together. There appears to be no state of in-between-ess. It seems only to represent a Kierkegaardian Either/Or.

I made this miniature installation “Precarious, delicate feminism – are you floating or drowning?”at the Botanical Garden in Vienna, in the Nymphoides Peltata – Heimische Seekanne (Fringed Water-Lily) Pond this evening around 6pm. By some random synchronicity, an exhibition opened a few minutes later, coincidentally 10 metres away from my installation, with Lisa Kuglitsch’s meditative compos(t)ing, a performance act which focussed on the simultaneity and reciprocity of death and life, where she re-heaped a pile of compost, resulting in the dirty weathering of her dress.